722 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Era
from the West— Mayor Bertha Landes in Seattle (1926–1928), Congresswoman
Jeanette Rankin of Montana (elected 1916 and 1940), and, in the 1920s, gover-
nors Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming.
Cynics charged that Wyoming legislators used suffrage to attract more
female migrants to their predominantly male state, while Utah hoped to
enhance the political power of husbands in polygamous marriages banned by
law but still practiced by some Mormons. In Colorado and Idaho, however, the
success of referendums in the 1890s reflected the power of the Populist Party,
a strong supporter of votes for women. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more
western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the first state east
of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections.
These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere,
were conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effective use of
the techniques of advertising, publicity, and mass entertainment characteristic of
modern consumer society. California’s successful 1911 campaign utilized auto-
mobile parades, numerous billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage
buttons and badges. Nonetheless, state campaigns were difficult, expensive, and
usually unsuccessful. The movement increasingly focused its attention on secur-
ing a national constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.
Maternalist Reform
Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire
the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Many of the era’s experiments in
public policy arose from the conviction that the state had an obligation to pro-
tect women and children. Female reformers helped to launch a mass movement
for direct government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers
and children. Laws providing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of
young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. The pen-
sions tended to be less than generous, and local eligibility requirements opened
the door to unequal treatment (white widows benefited the most, single moth-
ers were widely discriminated against, and black women were almost entirely
excluded). Maternalist reforms like mothers’ pensions rested on the assump-
tion that the government should encourage women’s capacity for bearing and
raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same
time. Both feminists and believers in conventional domestic roles supported
such measures. The former hoped that these laws would subvert women’s
dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen traditional families
and the mother- child bond.
Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did
in fact work outside the home, but defined them as a dependent group (like